"Finally, I suspect that it is by entering that deep place inside us where our secrets are kept that we come perhaps closer than we do anywhere else to the One who, whether we realize it or not, is of all our secrets the most telling and the most precious we have to tell." Frederick Buechner

Come in! Come in!

"If you are a dreamer, come in. If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, a Hope-er, a Pray-er, a Magic Bean buyer; if you're a pretender, come sit by my fire. For we have some flax-golden tales to spin. Come in! Come in!" -- Shel Silverstein

Friday, April 18, 2014

Many pastors have already gotten their sermons written and ready to rock 'n roll.

Others . . . . . well, others . . . . .. don't.

There are a million and one details to chase. And, that's just in the church. Those of us who have families also have . . . . . . well, "other duties as assigned".

And then, there are those who are reading the lessons and singing in the choir and polishing the silver and arranging the flowers and . . . .

My prayers are with all those who strive to be faithful, each in their own way, during the remainder of the Paschal Triduum and onto Easter Day.

So, while I keep all those who fuss and fret and chase details in my prayers, here is a special one for pastors by Brian McLaren.

On our way to Calvary, may we always remember and never forget the promise of the empty tomb and the promise of Easter joy.

A prayer for pastors on Easter

Dear Lord, I pray for all the pastors today
Who will feel enormous pressure to have their sermon
Match the greatness of the subject
and will surely feel they have failed.
(I pray even more for those who think they have succeeded.)

Help them to know that it is enough

Simply and faithfully to tell the story
Of women in dawn hush ...
Of men running half-believing ...
Of rolled stones and folded grave-clothes ...
Of a supposed gardener saying the name of a crying woman ...
Of sad walkers encountering a stranger on the road home ...
Of an empty tomb and overflowing hearts.

Give them the wisdom to know that sincere humility and awe
Surpass all homiletic flourish
On this day of mysterious hope beyond all words.
Make them less conscious of their responsibility to preach,
And more confident of the Risen Christ
Whose presence trumps all efforts to proclaim it.

Considering all the Easter choirs who will sing beautifully,
and those who won't,
And all the Easter prayers that will soar in faith,
and those that will stumble and flounder,
And all the Easter attendance numbers and offering numbers
that will exceed expectations
And those that will disappoint ...

I pray they all will be surpassed by the simple joy
Of women and men standing in the presence of women and men,
Daring to proclaim and echo the good news:
Risen indeed! Alleluia!

For death is not the last word.
Violence is not the last word.
Hate is not the last word.
Money is not the last word.
Intimidation is not the last word.
Political power is not the last word.
Condemnation is not the last word.
Betrayal and failure are not the last word.
No: Each of them are left like rags in a tomb,
And from that tomb
Arises Christ,
Alive.

Help the preachers feel it,
And if they don't feel it, help them
Preach it anyway, allowing themselves
To be the receivers as well as the bearers of the Easter News.
Alleluia!

Sunday, April 13, 2014

In the name of
God, + who is Mystery, who is Incarnation, who is Spirit. Amen.

As I consider
the significance of this day – Palm Sunday – and the beginning of what we
Christians call Holy Week, I have been visited by the continued buzzing of piece of a
poem called “Last Night As I Was Sleeping” by the great Spanish poet, AntonioMachado. It begins:

Last night as I
was sleeping,

I
dreamt—marvelous error!—

that a spring
was breaking

out in my heart.

I said: Along
which secret aqueduct,

Oh water, are
you coming to me,

water of a new
life

that I have
never drunk?

It is the second
stanza, however, that continues to visit me:

Last night, as I
was sleeping.

I dreamt -
marvelous error!

that I had a
beehive

here inside my
heart.

And that the
golden bees

were making
white combs

and sweet honey

from my old
failures

Listen again to
that last sentence!

And that the
golden bees

were making
white combs

and sweet honey

from my old
failures.

If you listen closely you will hear them. There, in the far
distance. – a low hum is beginningdeep in your soul.The hum
will grow steadily into the sound of a buzz, which will grow fuller and deeper
and louder as the week continues.

Holy Week begins
the gathering of the Golden Bees of Heaven.

The Golden Bees
of Heaven need you. They need your regret and your grief, the memory of which
causes your heart to ache again in the places where it has been broken.

They
need the sense of loss and anger which have left a sour taste on the back of
your palate.

The Golden Bees of
Heaven are especially fond of betrayal and disappointment, but, oh my, how they
love the rich, deep, bitter darkness of depression.

All of these
human failures are pollen to the Bees.

They will buzz all ‘round the story of
Holy Week, and wait and watch as the story of the Passion of Jesus draws out
the pollen of regret, grief, anger, betrayal, disappointment and depression
from the depths of your own heart and soul.

They will take them – all of these
human failures – to their very bodies and carry them to the Queen of Heaven
where She will make of them a gift to be wept over and blessed with Her tears.

Then the Bees
will return them to us and begin to make of these, our old failures and
regrets, brilliant white combs of wax, which will provide the framework for us
to find our own salvation.

I know. I
understand. This is not what you were taught as a child. God, we were very
carefully taught, is the Great Master Puppeteer, and we are Pinocchio with
Geppetto-as-God-our-Father, controlling all the strings of our lives.

God is supposed
to remember the sacrifices you made – the chocolate or wine you gave up for
Lent.

If you sacrificed enough and prayed really hard, He – God – was supposed
to bring you that brand new bike or those spiffy new shoes or get you on the
team or help you pass the test for your driver’s license which would open the
door to unspeakable freedoms.

Later, that same Geppetto-Father-God, you thought, would get you
that job. Or, save your marriage. Or, heal your child.

And when He –
God – didn’t do these things, you would shrug your shoulders and figure you
weren’t good enough or deserving enough. That Santa Claus must have whispered something in God's ear which made it to God's Big Book of Failure. And your shoulders slumped and your heart was heavy and you feared asking for anything else. Of God. Or yourself. Or life.

Or, perhaps you repeated the cheery mantra that “When a door closes, God opens a
window,” and you would try to get on with a life of magical thinking, hoping against hope to find a Genie-In-a-Bottle of sorts who would help you find the right mystical incantation to unlock the Gates of The Treasures of Heaven as your own.

Or, maybe you would
get angry and blame something or someone – sometimes, even God – and never
really trust God enough to let yourself really be vulnerable and pray. Ever.
Again.

Some of us grow
up and come to be spiritually and emotionally mature enough to understand that life holds an abundance of
sophisticated irony and paradox and absurdity.

That all of these, our human failures, are
God’s repeated attempts to offer us the sweet honey of grace and mercy and the opportunity for a
new, transformed life.

Ernest
Hemmingway once wrote: “The world breaks everyone and afterwards, many are
strong in the weak places.”

Some
of us don’t – won’t, can't – understand that.

Yet God is persistent, battering down
our hearts with three-fisted Love in the form of mystery and incarnation and
spirit – all of which are especially present to us in the midst of the Passion
of Jesus in Holy Week.

Antonio
Machado’s poem ends with this stanza:

Last night as I
slept,

I
dreamt—marvelous error!—

that it was God
I had

here inside my
heart.

We are more able
to find God inside our hearts when we get a glimpse of the failures and fragility of our human lives. When we do that - when we are able to look at the absurdity and paradox and irony of life - we awake from our waking dream and discover our marvelous error.

Something is set in motion. The whole field shifts and
sets loose some strange mystery which we can neither comprehend nor control.

That is the work of Holy Week – to awaken us to the failures of the human
enterprise which, paradoxically begin to create the framework for us to find
our way to salvation, and open the floodgates of the waters of new life which we taste again as if for the first time.

It is Palm
Sunday. The Bees of Holy Week are beginning to gather. If you listen, you can
hear the hum of their buzzing.

They are here to gather to their bodies our
human failures – the pollen of regret, grief, anger, betrayal, disappointment
and depression from the depths of our own hearts and souls.

We will walk with
Jesus this week, as the story of his Passion unfolds. The Bees of Holy Week
will take all these human failures, if you surrender to them and don’t mind if
they sting a time or two, and make of them the sweet honey of Easter Resurrection.

We know the story. We know how it ends.

The Bees of Holy
Week are gathering.

Let them come.

Amen.

Note: I am grateful to my colleague David Anderson for reminding me of Antonio Machado's poem and for his idea of 'the Bees of Heaven' which became, for me, 'the Bees of Holy Week'.

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About Me

I am a joyful Christian who claims the fullness of the Anglican tradition of being evangelical, Anglo-Catholic, charismatic, orthodox and radical. Since 1991, my canonical residence has been the Diocese of Newark, where I was a member of the Women's Commission (since 1993), the Department of Missions (2 terms), The Commission on Ministry (1 term), The Standing Committee (4 years, one as President). I served as an elected Deputy to General Convention in 2000, 2003, and 2006. I have served as a board member of Integrity, USA, and as a founding member of Claiming The Blessing. I am national Convener of The Episcopal Women's Caucus, and am now member of the national board of RCRC. I attended the Lambeth Conference in 1998 and 2008 representing EWC. I graduated in May 2008 from Drew with my doctorate in Pastoral Care and Counseling and was Proctor Fellow at EDS, Spring Semester 2011. I am a GOE reader. I consult and counsel at Canterbury Pastoral Care Center in Harbeson, DE.

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Quotes from some of my favorite Bloggers and Friends

"How can you initiate someone and then treat them like a half-assed baptized?" - The Rt Rev Barbara Harris

Those who know the deep acceptance and love that come with healing and forgiveness can lose the defensive veneer that wants to shut out other sinners. They discover that covering their hair or hiding their tears or hoarding their rich perfume isn't the way that the beloved act, even if it makes others nervous. Katharine Jefferts Schori at Southwarck Cathedral, UK June 13, 2010

"If you have never been called a defiant, incorrigible, impossible woman … have faith … there is yet time." ~ From Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

If you want to protect Holy Wedlock, by all means padlock the church door whenever guys who love Judy Garland come-a-knocking. But if you want to protect marriage push for a constitutional amendment to ban divorce.

And . . . If that wasn't outrageous enough for you, there's this:

From where I sit, the entire Republican Party should head to OZ – looking for a brain, a heart and a pair of testicles.Helen Philipot

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. Thomas MertonEileen the Episcopalifem

"I can only conclude that the social contract that binds us all together in such a single unlikely country is greater than each of us who make it up." Counterlight.

"There ain't nothin' more powerful than the odor of mendacity . . .You can smell it. It smells like death."Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Lord, take me where You want me to go, let me meet who You want me to meet, tell me what You want me to say, and keep me out of Your way. Amen.Fr. Mychal Judge, OFM, Chaplain, NYFD, First official recorded victim 9/11 attack

"You can call the dogs in, wet the fire, and leave the house. The hunt's over." James Carville after the 2nd Presidential Debate

"Literalism in any form is little more than pious hysteria."John Shelby Spong, Bishop of Newark, retired

"Start where you are.Use what you have.Do what you can."Arthur Ashe.

"Ask for help when you need it. Take it graciously when it comes. Try not to be disappointed when it doesn't. Be thankful for something every day. Do something for someone else as a way of saying thank you for your life."John R. Souza